SSRS 2008 R2 chained parameters

Question

I have a report with three parameters: A country combo box, a start date and end date (of the fiscal year). I want the start date and end date to be updated depending of the country combo box selection.

I made a dataset that receives the country code as a parameter and returns the start date and end date for the selected country. Then I linked the default value of the dates to the dataset.

This works perfectly the first time a country is selected but not for the subsequent country selections. If I change the type of the dates parameters to combo boxes it works every time but I don't want to lose the flexibility of "fine tuning" the dates after the country is selected.

am I asking the impossible?

Answer 1

Microsoft regard this behaviour as being by design - see this Microsoft Connect issue.

There is a workaround in general - the dependent parameter gets refreshed when its values are invalidated by the selection in the first parameter.

However, since you want the users to be able to override the start and end dates, you can't specify that the default values for the country are to be the only values available.

What you could do would be to add a second country parameter after the first, whose default and only available values are the value of the first country parameter, and to set the default values of the start and end parameters based on the value of the second country parameter.

Unfortunately, if you set the second country parameter to be hidden, its default value does not get populated - so the second country parameter would have to remain visible, for this to work.

You could make use of this - for example, by displaying the default date range for the country as the label for the parameter; this would enable the user to see where the default date range has been overridden.